At 38, menopause arrived in my life like a crazy cyclone I didn’t yet have a name for.

I thought I was losing my mind — panic attacks, sleepless nights, wild anxiety —except none of it was ‘in my head.’ My body was speaking in a new dialect I had never been taught to understand. No one had prepared me for this particular curriculum of becoming. It was as though every fault-line in my life lit up at once, a crackling map of grief and transformation.

Thanks for reading Musings! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

While medical professionals are trying their best and research is finally being done, they don’t really have the language for it either.

So I found my own: through endless solitary hikes, journaling, meditation, and basically cracking open over and over again.

Through rupture and revelation, a slow remembering took place… that my body is not a machine but kin.

Early menopause didn’t end me. But it definitely rewrote me.

This conversation is part confession, part guide. A way of making public what so many women endure privately. Because silence nearly cost me my life and it has cost generations of us more than we know.

Welcome to the conversation we were never invited into, but desperately need.

The Silence Around Menopause is Loud

We inherit silence. Our mothers whispered it; our grandmothers swallowed it. Menopause became the punchline to a joke shaped by patriarchy. It’s the moment (which isn’t a moment but a years long process) that a woman becomes less desirable, less fertile…less useful. In the biomedical gaze, menopause marks a ‘decline.’

But the truth is more complicated.And far more mystical.

Feminist new materialists like Karen Barad remind us that bodies are not fixed entities— they are intra-active, continually becoming in relation to the world. Rosi Braidotti calls midlife a ‘threshold of new subjectivity,’ a point of intense generativity. Indigenous cosmologies treat life transitions as portals, rather than failures.

Menopause is not an ending, but a crossing.

A shift in rhythm and a rearranging of the internal weather.It rewires perception, intuition, and truth.

The Symptoms No One Talks About

Before my cycle changed, my mind changed.

The panic was wild, anxiety feral and insomnia an endless trial.

Later I would learn these were hormonal surges — nighttime cortisol spikes, estrogen fluctuations — but at the time, it felt like an unravelling without a witness.

Research shows:

* Emotional and psychological symptoms often appear years before physical ones.

* Early menopause affects 1 in 100 women globally.

* Many women are misdiagnosed with anxiety or depression for years.

* Women of colour face added layers of weathering— the cumulative impact of racism, trauma, and generational stress.

My body wasn’t betraying me.It was alerting me.

But without language, we often interpret these signals as failure instead of initiation.

Myths We Must Release

Here are the myths I’m burning down:

Myth 1: Menopause is just hot flashes

There are over 30 documented symptoms, including intense emotional, cognitive, and sensory ones.

Myth 2: It only happens around 50

Perimenopause often begins in your late 30s, and early menopause is real.

Myth 3: Menopause = decline

Anthropologist Kristen Hawkes suggests post-menopausal women were evolutionarily central to human survival. Many women feel more creative, courageous, and purposeful after the shift.

I’ve come to embrace the Crone archetype, not as a caricature of age, but as a rebellion against the capitalist anti-aging machine that feeds on our insecurities.

Myth 4: Hormones tell the whole story

Menopause is a biopsychosocial-spiritual transition.Trauma, race, stress, environment, ancestry… all shape the experience.

Menopause as Portal

Menopause forced me into a different relationship with my body ~ less control, more curiosity; less pushing, more listening; less performance, more presence.

Qigong, yoga, and mindful movement weren’t supplements to my life, they became survival strategies. Evidence-based, yes, but also deeply intuitive. The kind of knowledge our great-grandmothers would recognise.

Bayo Akomolafe writes,

‘The cracks are not where things break down, but where the world leaks through.’

Menopause cracked me open. And through the fissures came clarity, courage, and an unflinching honesty I had long postponed.

What Helped (and Might Help You Too)

From both research and lived experience:

Movement – Qigong, yoga, walking, dancing, shaking out the stucknessMindfulness – breathwork, sleep hygiene, slowing the nervous systemCreativity – journaling, art-making, voice reclamationCommunity – shame-free circles, women speaking openly, daily validationInformation – accurate, non-fear-based, not just HRT-centricSpiritual frameworks – rites of passage, thresholds, archetypes, ancestors

This transition asks us to stop asking,What’s wrong with me?and start asking,What is my body trying to teach me?

What Women Need Most

Evidence shows that community support dramatically reduces symptom burden. We need spaces without judgment, representation for younger women in menopause, alternatives for those who can’t or don’t want HRT; cultural, spiritual, and embodied interpretations; honesty, softness, and sisterhood.

The ‘good girl’ persona doesn’t survive menopause.And that’s a blessing.

If Menopause Could Speak…

She would say every so gently:

Slow down.Listen.Shed what no longer serves.Even if that means shedding entire personas.

You are not ending.Rather becoming… again, and again, and again.

Be humble in the face of this transformation.Be in awe of your own turning.

An Invitation

This is a beginning.

A way to break the inherited silence and make meaning together.Let’s hold this transition as a sacred, embodied shift,not a pathology or a decline, but a powerful re-becoming.

If you’ve moved through menopause, are moving through it, or suspect you’re standing at the threshold ~

You are not alone.Your story matters.Let’s un-silence and honour it.

Thanks for reading Musings! This post is public so feel free to share it.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit charisselouw.substack.com